A Hollywood treatment

“It was right in this room,” William Friedkin says, easing himself into a wing chair and waving an arm about the elegantly comfy wood-paneled study in his brick Tudor Bel-Air manse. “Placido and Edgar stopped by and gave me their offer: ‘What do you think of doing “Ariadne auf Naxos”?’ ”

Friedkin, the Oscar-winning director of “The French Connection” and “The Exorcist,” was already on a first-name basis with Los Angeles Opera general director Placido Domingo and artistic director Edgar Baitzel when they posed that question. In 2002, he had staged a double bill here that was a hit with audiences and critics alike. He obviously relishes describing his later negotiations with the men.

“I leaned back, pondered and said, ‘Yeah, good idea. Can you cast it well?’ ”

They assured him they could. They had commitments from soprano Petra Maria Schnitzer and tenor Peter Seiffert, hot new singers well known in Europe and on their way to the top in this country.

So within minutes, Friedkin says, he gave his consent. The resulting production of “Ariadne,” Richard Strauss’ quirky masterpiece about a moneyman, a composer and a willful diva, will open a seven-performance run at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion next Sunday.

Friedkin, moreover, is far from the only Hollywood hand who has joined fortunes with Los Angeles Opera. In November, the company will revive the late Herbert Ross’ 1993 production of “La Boheme.” In May, Academy Award-winning actor Maximilian Schell, who directed an impressive “Lohengrin” in 2001, will stage “Der Rosenkavalier.” Next season, Garry Marshall (“Pretty Woman”) is scheduled to mount a little-known Offenbach opera. Bruce Beresford (“Driving Miss Daisy”) and the late John Schlesinger (“Midnight Cowboy”) are among the other filmmakers who have done productions here.

L.A. Opera’s masterminds clearly decided that veterans of moviemaking could bring theatrical gold to the lyric stage. But how did they know that the culture of an industry dubbed Tinseltown had the potential to be in sync with high art?

“Placido and I -- we were the committee -- sat down to develop an overall core idea for our productions,” Baitzel says, recalling discussions after Domingo took the helm four years ago. “And here was this list of film people, hundreds of them, who just might fit the bill.” But the pair’s primary motivation for striking such a rich vein, he says, was to mine Hollywood’s “remake” mind-set. They saw it as a way to contemporize operas from past centuries -- in other words, the standard repertory.

“In Europe today, they’re having a crisis,” Baitzel says. “Productions are all about interpretation. [Directors] have gotten so far out and so far from the original intent -- because the operas themselves are old news there -- that audiences finally feel disconnected from the result. So what we want to do is give both a recognizable form of the story and a creative challenge that helps with updating -- a bridge to the near and far.”

Opera and film directors are “two different kinds of beasts,” however. “We couldn’t cast Julia Roberts. That means our organization must kick in and provide a Bill Friedkin the team he needs. We must adapt to him, fill in the blanks for him.”

A link to the contemporary

Friedkin, who turned 69 last week, has certainly earned his operatic bona fides. Before his local double bill -- a starkly otherworldly version of Bartok’s “Duke Bluebeard’s Castle” paired with a sweetly uproarious take on Puccini’s “Gianni Schicchi” -- he directed a production of Berg’s “Wozzeck” in Florence for conductor Zubin Mehta that was widely acclaimed. Now his calendar for the next several years is studded with additional opera projects here and in Tel Aviv; Munich, Germany; and Turin, Italy.

“I follow the doctor’s credo,” he says. “Do no harm. The onus is on me to have an approach that’s original and sincere.” But just because most operas performed today were written in the 19th century or earlier “does not mean we need to stage them as though Victoria were still on the throne.” Finding a link to the contemporary, he says, is critical.

“Ariadne,” which the director believes allows him to take liberties, certainly lends itself to the fanciful, in terms of both theatrical invention and metaphor. A comedy of deft and subtle caricature swathed in a mixture of Strauss’ glittery vocal heroics at their grandest and his simple musical affection at its most heartwarming, the libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal twists the Teutonic ideals of ultimate-love-through-death and art-as-a-holy-entity until the two become endearing outgrowths of human folly.

The work is a delectable but elusive opera-within-an-opera, peopled with gods, commedia dell’arte characters, impresarios, creators and a wealthy patron. They argue about the respective merits of art versus commerce and about how the two collide -- the same issues that might well be squabbled over at a high-powered Hollywood meeting.

The stakes in the opera, in fact, could scarcely be more familiar to Friedkin. “They have a tremendous resonance in the social settings I move in,” says the director, whose wife, Sherry Lansing, is chairman of the Paramount Motion Picture Group (and also sits on the Los Angeles Opera board). “A very rich person can dictate the terms of the entertainment he underwrites.”

At L.A. Opera, though, Friedkin is being given a near carte blanche that movie directors seldom enjoy. “That’s what I love about this,” he says, sipping from a bottle of Evian. “With a film, one has to get every single detail approved, even though the project is all about the director. At best in opera, it’s a collaboration. Curiously, I’m given great flexibility -- no one looks over my shoulder. Yet the first order of business is the music. All else is second to that.”

Not exactly an organizing principle for the crop of new opera directors eager to achieve shock value at any cost and/or to crowd the proceedings with constant, unscripted stage business. But Friedkin says: “Why delude myself? I know that audiences don’t come to see what I’ve devised so much as to see an opera they love.” He’s also mindful of George Bernard Shaw’s dictum: “Buy a ticket, go to the high balcony, put your feet up, close your eyes and listen.”

Still, a Friedkin production is never a stand-and-sing affair.

For “Ariadne,” he asked Edwin Chan, Frank Gehry’s principal design partner, to construct his first opera set -- “a whimsical house that he might do for a patron,” a relative of the one in the Marx Brothers’ “A Night at the Opera” that’s also akin to the villa in which Friedkin placed his “Gianni Schicchi.” “Ariadne,” he says, shares qualities with both works.

“Act 1 is like ‘Noises Off.’ It’s a perfect backstage comedy a la Moliere.” When the curtain goes up on the prologue, he says, everyone will recognize the Gehry style. The second act, which combines opera buffa and opera seria, takes place in the patron’s backyard (with Ariadne, the heroine of the “real” opera, waiting on a desert island, Naxos, for the god Bacchus).

“What we’ve got in ‘Ariadne’ is French farce and German opera that drink from the same well as the Marx Brothers,” he says. “In those productions I’ve seen, there is never enough comedy when called for. Instead it’s shoved aside, it’s sort of drizzled on as an accent.” At the Chandler, he predicts, it will come across as a feast, but not at the expense of the great arias and duets -- during which all stage business will screech to a halt.

The hilarity, Friedkin says, ensues when the patron superimposes the antics of a burlesque troupe onto a threadbare little traveling opera company -- contrasting the improvisational players, who avoid routines, with an opera seria, which is set in stone.

“It’s a wonderful work, very user-friendly. You can laugh and not feel guilty.”

Show-business roots

It’s 11 a.m. at a rehearsal studio on Pico Boulevard, and Friedkin sits at a long table flanked by various L.A. Opera staff members. He’s addressing the cast, offering good-natured wisecracks in answer to their questions before launching into a run-through of Act 2. To one observation, he responds, “Well, we’ll have to wire Mr. Hofmannsthal’s agent on that one.”

Once the piano rehearsal begins, with the conductor perched high on a stool, Friedkin’s sotto voce comments turn serious and are addressed only to the assistant director, seated next to him. But when soprano Schnitzer, the Ariadne, shows a certain unease about how to lie against a rock, he approaches and says, “Use the same pose as in the De Chirico painting from Act 1.” And at each silly routine -- as when the male commedia dell’arte players appear with inflated rubber pool toys hoisted to their waists -- he beams broadly.

Friedkin’s show-business roots can be traced to his hometown, Chicago, where he started his career in a TV station mailroom. Soon he was directing for the small screen and making socially conscious documentaries -- one of them about an innocent death-row inmate, whose sentence was commuted as a result of a prize the film garnered -- and another, which also won an award, about the Chicago Symphony. His later film adaptations of stage plays, among them Harold Pinter’s “The Birthday Party” and the gay groundbreaker “The Boys in the Band,” showed still more of his catholicity. He’s as comfortable talking about the Italian avant-garde playwright Dario Fo, French farceur Georges Feydeau and British bad-boy dramatist Joe Orton as about Boris Karloff and the horror-movie genre on which he’s also made his mark.

“My taste takes me to all genres,” he says. “Often it depends on opportunity, as in this case. You know, all ideas are God-given. You can sit and think and nothing may come to you. But then comes a flood of ideas. Without being too Shirley MacLaine about it, I try to channel the composer and librettist: If they were around today and could employ this level of performance and technical facility, how would they like to see the work?

“I’m sure it would not be something frozen in the 19th century. But also it wouldn’t be covered in current-day graffiti” -- like those outre productions with characters urinating onstage, for instance.

“That’s the hat trick. How to do it so as to be relevant but not despoiled.”

*

‘Ariadne auf Naxos’

Where: Los Angeles Opera at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., L.A.

When: 4 p.m. next Sunday; 7:30 p.m. Sept. 16, 22, 25 and 29; 2 p.m. Sept. 18 and Oct. 2

Price: $25 to $190

Contact: (213) 972-8001